The Dons and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  Dickens saved the day. Dodgson and I were too stunned to even speak.

  “My, what wonderful colours for a room,” Dickens exclaimed after his initial shock. “Is the strongest influence Chinese or Indian?” he asked ingenuously.

  Squonce was delighted.

  God knows what dour Bathgate was thinking.

  “Oh yes, yes, both, both,” Squonce gushed. “Aren’t the colours amusing and amazing? This is Jack Bathgate, by the way. My neighbour here in this thirteenth-century monastery. He tends to darken any room no matter how bright it may be.”

  “Gentlemen,” glum Bathgate greeted us with a bow, utterly ignoring Squonce’s demeaning raillery.

  “Sit down. Sit down,” little Squonce insisted. “We have read all of your novels, have we not, Jack? But then, who hasn’t? Mr. Dickens is the most read man in England after friend Shakespeare perhaps. Sit down. Sit down. The tea is hot. The cakes are sweet. We have so much to discuss.”

  We did as we were directed, ranging ourselves rather self-consciously about the room on pillows and hassocks and stuffed shapes of all sorts.

  “Please. Please. Help yourself to the cakes. Can I pour you a cup of hot tea? Or would you like something a bit stronger?” this Squonce just seemed to be nattering on while his dour companion, Bathgate, sat and stared at us from the sofa. “We’ve got a nice Anjou pink that you might enjoy, or perhaps something a bit more adventurous for your London tastes, an absinthe liqueur?”

  “No, no,” Dickens raised his hand to Squonce’s out-of-control rambling. “Tea is fine, excellent, especially this early in the afternoon.”

  “Excellent, then. Tea it shall be.” Little Squonce seemed delighted at our choice. “Can I sweeten it for you? Lemon perhaps? Milk?”

  “Yes, please, lemon.” Dickens affably let him play the compleat hostess.

  Our tea delivered, the cakes passed and politely sampled, our host collapsed into a wildly flowered jungle chair that looked as if it had just been canoed out of the interior of Sumatra, and resumed his gushing over Dickens’s eminent presence. “What an unutterable surprise and happy event to have you here in our house,” Wherry Squonce went on. “I have always wanted to entertain a great writer like yourself, isn’t that right, Jack?” and he turned to his gloomy companion, who nodded his assent and, to all of our surprise, spoke.

  “Yes, you have said that,” dour Bathgate glared at us, “even if they do come here as spies of the Queen!”

  For a moment, I did not think I had heard him right. Dickens’s head snapped up towards him as soon as he said it. Dodgson looked at me and I at him in utter confusion.

  “I beg your pardon?” Dickens was the first of the three of us to recover. “What did you say?”

  “Oh, and it was such a nice tea party,” little Squonce mourned this turn.

  “I said,” and glum Bathgate scowled levelly at us as he repeated himself, “that we know that you are here as spies of the Queen.”

  As he said it, he reached beneath one of the pillows on the sofa on which he sat and his hand emerged holding a large black revolver, which he proceeded to level at Dickens, Dodgson, and myself. We sat staring at him, mouths agape, the taste of the tea turning bitter in our throats.

  “Oh, don’t fret at all,” rabbitty little Squonce smiled reassuringly at us. “We knew you weren’t all the way down from London just to talk about putting on an amateur play. Jack, put that ugly thing down. You’ll frighten our guests.” He waved his hand at his dark co-conspirator. “And our guests you are going to be, for at least a couple of days. Then, we will be off to the Continent and away from this terrible hell-hole of pretension and overrated intellectual narcissism.”

  I almost choked on his metaphor, considering the way he was dressed and the preponderance of mirrors that nearly outnumbered the paintings on the walls of his parlour. It was all so civilized yet inexplicable. How could they know why we were here? Not thinking, I jumped to my feet to protest the absurdity of it, but Bathgate slowly levelled his pistol right at my face.

  “Do you think that we are so stupid that we did not notice your poking around Oxford?” Bathgate growled like a mastiff.

  But my leaping to my feet had occasioned an even more inexplicable effect. As I stood looking at that pistol pointed right at me and then turned to look at Dickens and Dodgson, who were still sitting on the sofa in shock, my eyes began to blur, my knees began to buckle, and the room began to float and waver as if I was in a dream. I tried to steady myself and staggered sideways, knocking one of those ridiculous pieces of sensual sculpture off its fragile pedestal table and sending it crashing to the floor. I reached out to Dickens and Dodgson, who were just sitting there on the sofa as if they were asleep, but they offered no help. I toppled sideways to the welcoming softness of the Oriental rug on the floor, and everything went dim and dark as I sank into a furry bed of blackness.

  The Cottage in the Wood

  December 13, 1853—Night into Day

  I awoke on a rustic bed on the floor of a pitch black room with a terrible ringing in my head and my greatcoat wrapped around me like a blanket. I sat bolt upright and must have muttered something because Dickens’s voice answered me out of the darkness.

  “I am here, Wilkie,” Charles attempted to reassure me, “and Dodo is still sleeping, there, next to you on the floor. Do not step on him.”

  “But what? Where?” It seemed that all I could muster through the throbbing in my brain and the deepness of the dark were a few disconnected words.

  “I do not know where we are,” Dickens answered my incoherence as if we were conducting a perfectly intelligible conversation. It never ceased to amaze me how utterly unflappable, no matter what the circumstances, that man could be. “I have just awakened myself, only moments ago. It appears we have been drugged. In the tea those scoundrels poured us, I presume. I have already expended one of my lucifers looking about. Some sort of country cottage or rough hunting lodge. There is only one door and it is bolted fast from the outside. Somehow they have transported us here and locked us in. They evidently want us out of the way.”

  “Oh my head,” I groaned.

  “That could be the effect of the drug, or perhaps you fell and hit your head when the drug overcame you. The last I remember, Bathgate was threatening you with his pistol, then everything went dark.”

  “Ohhh,” a long moan came from the darkness to my side.

  “Dodgson, we are here.” Dickens turned his attention to our painfully awakening friend and apprised him of our circumstances.

  Dickens struck a light, another of his lucifers. Thank God we smoked cigars.

  The three of us huddled in the centre of this small room like cavemen around the first fire. Rough straw pallets covered the floor and had provided our only comfort. The walls were of heavy stone. The door looked to be of stout wood. Only one window was set in a side wall, and it seemed to be tightly shuttered on the outside because no light or movement could be discerned upon looking through it. Then Dickens’s lucifer flickered out and the darkness encompassed us once again.

  We decided that it was the better part of valour to conserve our remaining lucifers and to wait until day broke before trying to escape our rustic prison.

  “It is unthinkable that t-t-two Oxford D-D-Dons would k-k-kidnap gentlemen at g-g-gunpoint,” Dodgson took up our midnight colloquy.

  “For some reason, they have grown quite desperate,” I offered.

  “Field’s visit to their ring of conspirators in the pub the other night must have thrown quite a scare into them,” Dickens speculated.

  “Or they murdered Ackroyd and Stadler,” Dodgson pursued the logical path, “and they feel they have nothing t-t-to lose by k-k-kidnapping us.”

  “If that is the case,” Dickens’s voice was cold, “why did they not just kill us?

  “In Balliol C-C-College? In the centre of Oxford? I think not!” Dodgson scoffed. “The b-b-blood. The b-b-bodies. It would never do.”

  “It must ha
ve been some trick to carry us out of there in our state.” Dickens pictured the awkwardness of it.

  “They must have sent the g-g-gate porter off on some errand while they t-t-took us out,” Dodgson speculated.

  “They must have had help.” Dickens was certain. “If that is the case, then they have brought us out here to keep us out of the way so that no one will find us until long after they have fled to the Continent.”

  “But why are they planning to leave?” I posed the next question. “They spoke about leaving as if it was a planned thing, something they were going to do anyway, before we ever entered the picture.”

  “Precisely, because it was already part of their plan,” Dickens pounced upon my puzzled question. “You have hit on it, Wilkie. Something is afoot. Some larger plan that they are going to carry out before they flee to wherever they are going.”

  “The Queen?”

  “The Queen!”

  Dodgson and I, in the pitch darkness, simultaneously saw the light.

  “That may be it,” Dickens sounded much more calculating. “They are going to set off their bomb and kill the Queen, then flee to the Continent.”

  “And we suspected it,” Dodgson was thinking aloud, “and, and, they need t-t-to k-k-keep us out of the way until all is d-d-done.”

  “Precisely!” Dickens snapped his fingers in the void of darkness. “Until they bring their bloody Gunpowder Plot to fruition.”

  How did they know that we were on to them?

  How did they know that we were Field’s spies?

  Were they really out to assassinate the Queen?

  Why did they murder Ackroyd and Stadler, two of their own?

  What were we to do? How were we going to escape?

  These were but some of the questions that entertained our conversation over the ensuing hours until small chinks of grey daylight began to poke through the ancient stone walls of our makeshift prison.

  Daylight’s coming did not give us much light inside our musty hovel, but it gave us enough to move about and see what we had at our disposal for making our escape if an opportunity presented itself.

  The door was immovable. It was dead-bolted from the outside. The window was tightly shuttered and also seemed to have a heavy iron bar across it. The inside furnishings offered little more encouragement. Besides the rough pallets of straw on the floor, there was a chamberpot and a wooden bucket filled with water. A wooden armchair, sitting lopsided and useless with one of its legs rotted off, completed the interior furnishings of the place.

  Dickens prowled the room in the dim light looking for some means of escape. He picked up the chair with the rotted leg and swung it as hard as he could against the shuttered window, to no effect. The heavy wooden shutters did not move and, upon two more applications of the chair, would not break.

  Dickens gave up on that avenue of escape and went back to prowling the room, thinking, searching for something, anything.

  “Aha!” he exclaimed, as if he had just come upon some buried treasure. “What have we here?”

  He emerged from the mould and spiderwebs of one of the hovel’s dark corners holding a tattered and rotting coil of rope in his right hand. “We ought to be able to use this for something.” He held it out encouragingly to Dodgson and me.

  Nobody said a word for a long moment.

  “We c-c-could b-b-build a mant-t-trap,” Dodgson tentatively suggested. “I have read about them in a b-b-book. It is how the p-p-pygmies and c-c-cannibals hunt in Africa.”

  Dickens and I just stared at him, attempting to visualize what he was seeing in his esoteric academic brain.

  “Something that swings on this rope that will take down a man.” Dickens’s powers of visualization were much stronger than mine.

  “Yes, yes,” Dodgson nodded avidly, “that was how it was described in the b-b-books.”

  “Here,” Dickens darted across the room, “we can hang it here on this roof beam and aim it at the doorway.”

  “And when someone comes in, we push it at him and it knocks him down,” I finished Dickens’s thought, envisioning this contraption.

  “Exactly, Wilkie,” Dickens beamed, already testing the rope in his hands.

  “I think that it will work.” Dodgson the mathematician stood directly under the roof beam, first looking up, then swivelling his head towards the door, “b-b-but we must c-c-calculate exactly the height of the p-p-projectile, the length of the swing, the angle at which we t-t-tie the rope, and the weight of the p-p-push that b-b-begins its momentum.”

  I looked at Dickens and Dickens looked at me. We both burst out laughing at our mathematical Don. Dodgson’s academic seriousness, his inventor’s curiosity, in this absurd and desperate situation seemed both so out of place and so genuine that we could not help but laugh. It broke the tension, made us forget for a moment our forced imprisonment.

  We chose the broken chair as our projectile. Dickens, standing on Dodgson’s and my shoulders, fastened the rope securely around the roof beam. Dodgson actually calculated the length of the rope and the distance of the swing, and even indulged himself with calculating the velocity that the flying chair would reach before hitting the man coming through the doorway square in the face and chest (depending, of course, upon the height of the man, which he also calculated).

  We worked upon our creation the better part of the morning and tested it twice, making adjustments to Dodgson’s satisfaction. “No matter if it is Squonce or B-B-Bathgate,” Dodgson explained, “the chair is large enough that it will knock either of them d-d-down. Besides, they are b-b-both really the same height because B-B-Bathgate will have t-t-to stoop t-t-to g-g-get through the d-d-door.”

  The engineering completed, and our mantrap ready to spring, we set about planning how we would lure our captors into the doorway when they arrived to deal with us, which they would surely do.

  “What if they have just left us here to starve? What if they have no intention of coming back?” Dickens finally voiced the one dread that had haunted all of our minds during the preparation of our wonderful machine.

  We waited what seemed an eternity but was only a matter of hours for someone to come. Dodgson was in charge of the mantrap. When the door opened, he would set it in motion with a strong push towards its target. I was stationed to the side of the doorway to leap upon the man entering and seize his pistol when the mantrap knocked him down. Dickens was to be the voice of the operation, presenting the arguments to lure our captors into the opened doorway.

  We waited. Noon passed, then one on my gold repeater. We all dreaded the prospect of spending another damp and freezing night in this godforsaken place. Finally, a little after two, we heard a horse’s hoofs approaching up what must have been a path to the cottage door.

  Springing the Trap

  December 14, 1853—Afternoon

  The rider took a moment to tether his horse. We could hear footfalls through the chinks in the stone walls.

  “You three in there!” His voice boomed in our eagerly listening ears from just on the other side of the door. It was Bathgate, unmistakably.

  “Yes, we are here,” Dickens answered him calmly, though rather overstating the obvious.

  “I have brought you some food, bread, and a skin of wine. It will hold you until you are released.”

  That answered a number of our questions. They were not out to kill us or leave us imprisoned to starve.

  “Why have you locked us in here?” Dickens asked, still as calm as an infant playing in the line of fire.

  “That is none of your concern,” Bathgate answered, as if he and Dickens were sitting in a pub over a pint of Irish stout rather than conversing through a bolted prison door. “Now move away from the door. I will slide these things in. My pistol is primed and cocked in my hand.”

  “But Dodgson is quite sick. The cold, the damp of last night. He has been quite delirious all morning. His health is quite fragile. You must get him to a physician or into hospital. We are afraid he might di
e.”

  Dickens was really quite cunning in his argument. He had decided that Bathgate’s reason for coming back and bringing food was that he and Squonce, his co-conspirator, did not want us to die.

  “Damn ye all!” Bathgate cursed us from outside the door. He seemed confused, hesitant. “I never should have come back,” he lamented.

  “No, do not go. We need the food. Dodgson will surely die if he gets no sustenance. Please do not leave us here to starve.”

  “Stand back from the door!” Bathgate ordered again. “I will shoot any man that I see!”

  “Yes, yes, we will,” Dickens shouted through the door and immediately went to his knees on the floor against the wall on the side away from which the door would swing.

  “Are you back and away?” Bathgate shouted again. “Stand clear.”

  We could hear the heavy bolt being lifted from the other side of the door.

  Dickens raised a finger to me behind the door, and then to Dodgson poised across the room with his mantrap, cautioning us to wait.

  The door slid open a crack, then stopped. A line of November sunlight traversed the rough dirt floor of the dim cottage.

  Dickens, on his knees low, pressed himself against the cottage wall.

  “Stand clear!” Bathgate barked once again.

  Dickens’s finger was still raised to us in the low light. We held our collective breaths in silence, waiting.

  The door slowly opened, a bit wider, then wider still. Well above Dickens’s head as he crouched low against the wall, the iron barrel of a pistol poked through the crack in the door, then quickly withdrew.